The image above is deceiving but is a good fit for the subject since all scams rely on taking advantage of you. We love beautiful women. We want to see beautiful women. We want good rankings and we do not have much money? We will look at the cheap deals. With this aside, let’s get back to the topic:

A friend of mine asked me how much I would charge to run an SEO optimization campaign for a site. I answered “It depends”. She told me: “Why? Just tell me how much you charge in case clients ask me!”

I then went on to explain why prices can vary a lot from one provider to the next and I explained why a few hundreds of dollars would be necessary as a minimum in 99.99% of cases. She understood everything but this is not the case with most clients.

I went on and started looking at prices. Most of the companies I knew actually raised the prices for their SEO services from the last time I checked. One firm went with around $300 to $500 more for the packages that they offer (from 10 keywords to 40 keywords or something similar). This meant that the MINIMUM charge for them was $1000 as an initial payment to work on 10 keywords. After 3 of them reached the first page in Google, the following payments for extra work and continuous growth would be $1000 per month. This means that an initial payment of $1000 is made, the work is done and the subscription based per month payment would only start after rankings are achieved.

The surprise came from the many shady services that are offered from people that either do not know SEO properly or that simply SPAM to get results. I found something like this:

“Your keyword on Google Page 1 for $18 through a link pyramid of 5,500 links”

What did they offer?

• A few hundreds of WIKI links
• Web 2.0 links
• Article Directory Links
• Social bookmarking
• Thousands of blog comments

NONE of these links are HIGH QUALITY BACKLINKS!

Would This Pyramid Work And Would The Ranking Be Obtained?

For MOST sites out there this would NEVER work. For the Warez, SPAM, cheat sites and so on, it can work. Also, that first position may be achieved in some cases but there is one guarantee that appears:

“Google will figure it out, links will disappear and that first page will only be reality for a really short period of time!”

Online business is all about consistency and working to achieve long term results. That is not what you get when you use incredibly cheap SEO services.

What you have to know about these types of links:

• Content is spun, it makes no sense and is obviously NOT written by a human being
• WIKI links eventually disappear
• Social bookmarking is rubbish
• Article Directory links are rubbish through such services and quite bad in general
• Blog comments would be spam, would look like spam and Google will see them as spam
• Web 2.0 links are of inferior quality than what you would expect or what is advertised

Conclusions

“If anyone offers cheap SEO services, do not accept them!”

You would only lose your money. In the event that some rankings are achieved, you can be sure that they will not be long term. In fact, many of the sellers of such services will tell you that you need to keep buying in order to keep the rankings and grow more in the event that the position is not achieved.

It is normal for your ranking to grow a little, especially if your site has no real links towards it. However, the benefits in terms of traffic would not be as high as you would think.

“Good ranking for bad keywords does not mean more traffic!”

Don’t expect to pay $18 dollars ONCE and have your site on the number 1 page in Google for keywords like “make money online”, “buy protein supplements”, “best anything”, “cheap something” and similar.